Start here¶

Each working paper has a plain-language companion: the paper carries the proofs, the data, and the caveats; the explainer carries the ideas. Nine explainers, three threads; each takes about ten minutes.

The measurement thread: what Europe actually holds¶

1. Is your "sovereign cloud" actually sovereign? Dependence travels down the whole supply chain, so checking the provider's passport checks almost nothing. The measured map of 49 categories, what the certificates do and cost, and which policy works at which layer.

2. Who could switch off Europe's digital economy? Two numbers for whole stacks: how many actors must act together to cut you off, and how many genuinely independent ways of operating you have. With the three-caterer illusion: every layer passes a two-suppliers test while one controller cuts everything.

3. Nobody denied you anything. The fifteen ways to hold power over a technology market, including the six quiet ones: they edit what you consider, and unconsidered options die.

4. Why Europe keeps losing the tech champions it grows. Control leaves through four doors, and one structural feature predicts staying: no governance-locked European technology firm was taken over against its will.

The mechanisms thread: why the instruments behave as they do¶

1. Cheaper, and losing. European cloud is several times cheaper and its share halved anyway: buyers sort by altitude, markets tip on network effects, subsidies saturate, and the levers that work are un-bundling and the egress rules. Playable live.

2. The subsidiary passes every audit. That is the problem. Which procurement requirements can tell a genuine supplier from a well-lawyered pretender: some cannot, at any price; fakes are complements; the best audit is a cascade; the bar is set by the richest pretender.

3. Portability or ownership screens? Wrong question. Exit instruments insure harms that announce themselves; screens prevent the silent ones; and in an exact band, the screen works only with the mandate beside it.

4. One Union, two opposite screens. Why Europe screened Huawei structurally and the hyperscalers behaviourally: verifiability plus where the losing coalition could spend its influence, with predictions and live falsifiers.

The architecture thread: where lock-in is made¶

1. How locked in are you, exactly? Two axes and an auditable exit-tax formula for cloud services; why egress rules can touch at most 30 percent of the exit tax; and the leverage ladder showing most EU spending at the shallow end. The interface is the sovereign asset.

The other guided entry point is interactive: the graph and the models, live.